Chaintech Geforce FX 5900XT SA5900X Review

Chaintech has a very competitively priced video card in its products range which offers a great price/performance ratio. Just how great? We ran it through our benchmark mill so we could let you know!

Test Setup and Quality Setting

Test Setup

Our test system consists of a P4 system which is handicapped due to its CPU being a 2.0 “A”, this one is limited to 400Mhz Quad Bus memory speed, and even when overclocked to 3Ghz it still is being bottlenecked by this, although performance comes close to an out-of-the-box P4 3Ghz “C” (800Mhz).

When the GF4 Ti4600 was launched it was the top performer, for a short period, until the Radeon 9700 Pro appeared on the scene. Nevertheless, today, it can still offer the enthusiast an enjoyable gaming experience.

“Low” end FX 5900 series vs “High” end GF4 series

Windows XP SP1 and the latest nVidia drivers (56.72) from the official website were installed on the tests system. The video card’s driver settings allows you to change Full Scene Antialiasing (FSAA), Anisotropic Filtering (AF) and overall mipmap quality settings. The slider gives you a choice between: Quality, Performance and High performance.

I disabled FSAA & AF and loaded up a game of MotoGP2 (1280x1024 @ max detail) to see how much visual and performance difference it would be when choosing the different image quality settings.

Average FPS recorded using FRAPS 2.0 during a replay of a spin around the “Le Mans” track gave the following results:

Quality: 43.38fpsPerformance: 47.07fpsHigh Performance: 48.89fps

Well by moving a slider you can get up to 5 FPS extra, how much difference is there visually?

Quality

Performance

High Performance

The difference between Performance and Quality lies in very small details, High Performance versus the other shows a bit more difference, but all in all nothing earth shattering and certainly not what you could call “high image quality degradation”

All the benchmarks were run with the “Image Quality” slider set to Performance as it offers a very good balance between speed and visually stunning graphics.